Category talk:Facts articles- person
Order of listing needs improving Misfits at the start At present a couple of dozen person articles are listed as though their names started with commas. They would be better distributed under letters of the alphabet, as are the bulk of the articles. I hope someone familiar with SMW can look at a couple, immediately see why they are nonconforming, and either fix them or leave instructions for one of us followers to follow to fix the problem. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 13:45, 21 July 2009 (UTC) Inconsistencies in the sections headed by letters Before anyone does any hard work on the above, we should reach a consensus about the desired standard order. Henry I, King of England (1068-1135) appears under "B", which someone may understand.Robin Patterson (Talk) 13:45, 21 July 2009 (UTC) :Henry's surname is Beauclerc. rtol 14:48, 21 July 2009 (UTC) ::I would call that his nickname, not his surname. Thurstan 22:30, 21 July 2009 (UTC) A few (e.g. Amelia Avery (1868-1934), Catherine Avery (1852-1921), Charlotte Mignon Crabtree (1847), Elizabeth Avery (1850-1937), Hiram Innes Gilbert (1849-1925), John Avery (1845-1915), Louise Henriëtte van Nassau (1627-1667), Martha Clark Hamilton (c1837), Mary Ann Clarke (1815-1904), Nicholas Messerly (1793), Samuel A Richards (1847-1940)) are here listed in PAGENAME order, which is the standard for surname categories but probably nowhere else. Most are listed in surname order, which (reassuringly) suggests that our standard DEFAULTSORT mechanism is working right. (And what comes after the surname to define the precise order appears to be PAGENAME rather than "Given names" - otherwise why is Catherine Anne Cramp listed before Catherine Cramp?) Which order is better? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 13:45, 21 July 2009 (UTC) :Doesn't look like anything to me. Did you try taking any of these articles at the beginning of the category listed under comma and put a defaultsort at the end? Sorting is not an issue as has been shown by articles that use standard wikimedia mechanisms for sorting (such as cat with bar or defaultsort). So I am not sure what is the concern here. If anyone finds an article that does not appear correctly after adding defaultsort at the end of an article, then that would be an issue. There are huge numbers of cosmetic errors like this in pre-alpha software. Instead, we are looking for systemic problems at this stage of the game: :*Like: can't use the new editor with the SMW forms (solved). :*Like: must refresh page after every edit (solved). :*Like: forms cannot be localized. :These are the levels of bugs being answered at this stage. 15:48, 21 July 2009 (UTC) Using this category Wikia's New Look seems to have given this category more prominence by listing it near the top of a page. My first reaction was to think that the category was of interest to few contributors and should therefore be hidden; but as soon as I had another look at it I realised its potential value as a lead-in to a filter search. A few lines down from the top it says "Filters: Filter:Birth period, Filter:Surname", clearly showing potential for finding all Familypedia people with a given surname (or more than one) and birth period, a much more flexible tool than a group of categories for "surname in period"; with a similar system that might one day replace our "surname in place" categories. I don't remember whether it has ever worked for me, though. It hasn't worked in the last few days. I click the first link, which says "Click here for filtering", and after a long wait get a blank screen. Part of the time it is transferring data from zedo.com, which is an interesting assertion on which to speculate while the search is going on. Can we get it working? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 09:03, November 4, 2010 (UTC) Here's an example of what we should be able to do with this sort of page: http://smw.referata.com/wiki/Special:BrowseData/Sites. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 01:22, November 5, 2010 (UTC)